'They marry their cousins'

I'm sorry to go on about this. Really. No, actually, I'm not. It's August and a slow news time, but even if it weren't, this is important. I draw your attention to Frank Rich's excellent column yesterday dissecting the history of the mosque controversy, thus:

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy's evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the "ground zero mosque" from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on "The O'Reilly Factor," interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project's organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. "I can't find many people who really have a problem with it," she said. "I like what you're trying to do."

Amazing, no? So what happened? This:

In the five months after The Times's initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham's benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper's inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X's illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on...

He refers to Pamela Geller. For fun, although you should bear in mind that she is apparently completely serious, go follow the links in Rich's piece to Gawker's write-up of Geller's Malcolm theory.

Finally:

At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch's News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified "reports" that Park51 has "money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas." As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week's revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.

Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51.

It all just defies comprehension, really, but the important part is that last sentence. Truer words were never spoken. It's only a controversy because of who's in the White House. That isn't to say that there aren't many Americans of decent will who understand the imam's right to build but think the project should be elsewhere. It is however to say that if Barack Obama weren't in the White House, those Americans of decent will probably would never have heard of this controversy in the first place, because Fox wouldn't have whipped it up, and no one else would have in its stead.

Along comes Michael Wolff today at newser.com to share with the rest of us some of what he saw behind the scenes in all those months he was hanging with Rupert writing his book. He writes:

I can attest to the obsession inside of Murdoch's News Corp. about Muslims. I've had conversations with Murdoch in which he, in pseudo-scientific fashion, parses the problem with Muslim intelligence (in brief, they marry their cousins), and conversations with Roger Ailes about the great Islamic plot to bring the terror war to his house in New Jersey.

In other words, all this stuff out of New Corp. is the real, unfiltered thing: retro, primitive, weird, reactionary, racist, paranoid, really, really old-guy stuff.

Wolff notes that it's a function in part of a feud between Roger Ailes and the Murdoch kids:

Again, it is about who has access to Murdoch—and Ailes is in New York. Murdoch, on his part, is told enough by his children, wife, and friends that Ailes is nuts (Murdoch: "He's crazy!") to want to distance himself from Ailes. But, at the same time, he also knows that his children are, relentlessly, trying to pressure him to give up more and more authority. So Ailes is his mad dog against his children.

While his children take over ever-larger parts of News Corp.'s entertainment and international operations, at the same time, Roger Ailes and the money-losing tabloid thugs at the Post have a freer run than they've had in a long time.

It's nice to know, by the way, is it not, that all this is in part being driven by Rupert's distaste for cousin-marriage. Psst, Rupert: It's another grounds on which to attack Darwin, who married his first-cousin, Emma.